At just 88 pages, there doesn’t seem to be much to say about this book. But for being so brief, it packs a lot into so few paragraphs.

The story is about a recently divorced young woman with a questionable romantic record who, to recover from her latest heartbreak, moves to a remote town in the Scottish Highlands. There, she rents a cottage on the edge of a forest with a reputation for strangeness amongst the locals, where she plans to continue making a living as a botanical illustrator (she draws plants and animals). One day, whilst venturing into Blackwood Forest in search of interesting plant specimens to illustrate, she stumbles upon a never-seen-before creature in the act of dismembering the deer it had hunted.

It’s a shock as brutal as encountering a bear whilst it’s feasting on its prey, and naturally, the creature reacts by going into attack mode. Startled, she reacts in an unusual way: she starts drawing the monster.

I still can’t tell you whether it was courage or a short circuit. My legs folded. My back found the birch trunk behind me. My hands—shaking, graphite-smudged, the hands of a woman whose survival instincts had apparently taken a personal day—opened my sketchpad to a clean page.

I started drawing.

Fast. Rough. The proportions were wrong, then closer, then wrong again because he kept shifting — the light rearranged his fur every time a cloud moved, and the face wasn’t fixed. The brow ridge heavy, almost Neanderthal, but the cheekbones underneath were angular, fine. The jaw was wrong for an animal. The jaw was wrong for a man. The jaw was the space between, and I couldn’t get the line right, and my hand kept trying anyway because that is what my hand does when confronted with something it can’t categorize.

The snarl died.

Seeing that, in her terror, she could do nothing but frantically draw and draw, the creature calms down and becomes curious about what Elara is drawing. It lets her finish a ridiculous number of sketches and then lets her go unharmed. She was so shaken by the encounter that she returns the next day, and again finds the creature in the same spot, this time not hunting but watching her as if it had been waiting for her. Again, she sits down to draw as the beast watches her with curiosity.

Thus, little by little, Elara gains his trust. Over several weeks, she goes daily to the clearing in the wood to meet the creature. She gifts it a drawing, sometimes speaks to him, draws a complete portrait after many sketches and studies, encourages him to speak again until he does, and tries to find out from the town librarian who or what this strange creature might be. Until finally, when she believes she has earned his trust, and is now aware of who he is and having witnessed the creature’s physical and mental changes through their daily interactions, Elara invites him to her cottage.

And what happens there isn’t hard to imagine.

As you may have guessed, the creature isn’t an animal but a cursed human. The book’s title indicates that he is a “Beast” in the fairy tale sense, not metaphorically. He has lived for years as an animal, with completely animal instincts and habits, despite not being 100% animal (his exact nature is difficult to determine, but from the author’s description, he seems to be a slightly more humanoid version of Harry from Harry and the Hendersons), and no one had noticed him until Elara’s discovery. He had been important in town, and the property left behind is coveted by land developers eager to get rid of him, so there’s a subplot about a land dispute that adds weight to the main plot in the second half.

From this short retelling, I liked the protagonist, Elara, whose first-person narration is sarcastic and self-deprecating. Compared to what I’m used to see in other Beauties, she’s unique: I don’t think I’ve ever seen another Beauty whose profession is illustrator. Her personality is also different from the usual Beauties: she’s not particularly kind or noble, she makes mistakes and terrible decisions with men, but overall she has a good heart. She’s not blind to her own flaws either; she knows she’s emotionally immature over men.

I also liked Sloane Becker’s writing style. She’s very economical with words and goes for brevity, getting straight to the point and not wasting ink on long, pretty words. That might seem a bit abrupt to some, but I find it polished and that shows she knows exactly what she wants to say. There’s very little dialogue here, and the descriptions aren’t long. That said, even though she’s economical with words, as if she won’t have enough ink to finish writing, she does have her favourite words to repeat often, like “architecture” and “that was fine.”

It’s clear that Sloane Becker is someone who observes a lot and speaks little. There are few authors like that, as they generally love to elaborate at length in their writing. Because of her style, this short novella is one of the few times I won’t utter my usual “it should have been long/longer.” Because, for a change, I don’t think The Beast of Thornfield needs more pages. It’s the perfect length for its plot, and what it lacks isn’t due to its brevity.

Thirdly, although with a caveat, I liked how the curse is resolved. Unlike other retellings where Beauty’s love helps break it, in this book the curse isn’t broken but transformed. Or, as Elara describes it:

It bent. The curse bent. Accommodated the absurd reality of a woman who’d walked into a cursed forest with a field kit and fallen in love with something that defied every taxonomy she’d ever trusted. Which was fine.

It’s interesting how this “twist” occurs for this Happy for Now ending to be possible. I think Elara is destined for a Henderson-esque life with her Harry, and I feel sorry for the poor thing.

And lastly, the atmosphere is excellent. The book’s subtitle is “A Scottish Gothic Romance,” and it’s an atypical Gothic because it’s set “outdoors,” so to speak, instead of in a gloomy castle or mansion full of ghosts and spells. This setting is refreshing; one gets tired of gloomy castles/mansions and, yes, even sentient houses, which are the norm. It suits the kind of relationship the main characters have: tender, wild, difficult, questionable, animalistic, and humanising.

Now, as for the thorns . . .

The first thorn that pricked my thumb was that this novella has three sex scenes. Three. Very detailed. In 88 pages. Isn’t it a bit excessive to have three explicit sex scenes in eighty pages? It’s not that they bothered me in themselves, because some have a purpose within the plot, as the creature transforms and becomes more human after each encounter. But since the book is so short, the last two scenes should have been either less explicit and shorter, or simply cut altogether. The first one is understandable and fits the plot well; the second isn’t necessary, and to me, it seems like the most obvious “filler sex” type of scene. The third wasn’t necessary either, but it has its narrative justification. So, it’s the second one that feels completely superfluous and would have been better left out, using the space instead to address an annoying plothole: to better explain the Blackwood curse.

The curse is the second thorn that pricked my thumb. It’s inherited, fine, but why, and what’s the cause? It’s never stated but left vague. And frankly, it’s ridiculous that Elara is more focused on shagging the creature than on figuring out why he’s the way he is. Yes, I know, she keeps repeating that she has a track record of bad choices in men, but, my dear girl, even Lorelai Gilmore takes two seconds to (mis)analyse her partner choices, and you as you’re shagging a Yeti don’t even stop for two seconds to ask yourself why he’s a Yeti?

Oh, dear . . .

So I was left wondering what caused the curse, whether the Blackwoods offended some faerie, whether the forest cursed them for the funsies, whether someone who coveted their land put a voodoo spell on them, or whether all this is a metaphor for inherited disease passing down from generation to generation. I don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing.

Perhaps in the next book, which the author says will star Moira, the librarian who helped Elara, details about the Blackwoods will be revealed, and we’ll finally learn what happened to them, since Moira seems to have known them or had some kind of connection to them. I do hope.